Time is a business resource. Like other resources, it is exhaustible and expensive. Planning and execution consume time. So, how you use or abuse time can make or break your business future. Consider just what time means to your business.
It comes down to time
Any business works on a budget, either the one you prepare or the one you discover as you go along. And, any budget is a function of time.
There are so many hours in a day, a month, a quarter, and a year. Employees are either full-time or part-time. Work processes take scheduled time. And, customers order things for delivery on time.
So, the only ways you can increase your resource is to use your time better or to hire employees who come with their own time. One person has 24 hours/day; two workers have 48 hours in the same day, and so on.
Recording time
If you do not plan your business’s time well, time can use you up and burn you out. Regardless of your business type, you need to schedule and monitor processes and the employees who you pay for their time.
So, since the dawn of the Industrial Age, employees have measured their employees’ time with time clocks. The traditional clock required workers to insert a timecard into a device that would stamp the time in and time out.
It was an innovation, but it had its problems. Chief among them was the failure or resistance of employees to cooperate.
However, you can’t refuse to pay for time worked but not recorded. And, you can’t discipline them by delaying their pay.
Most employees find punching a time clock demeaning, and they will waste time hovering around the clock before clocking in or out.
For the employer, processing timecards is cumbersome, mistake prone, and stokes a recordkeeping and storage problem.
Using time well
According to the team at Clockspot, pioneer in web time clocks, “you’ve got better things to do than spend your time wrestling with spreadsheets, impossible piles of paper and abusing that calculator you’ve owned since the 80’s.”
With an online web clock system, employees can check in and out from any location, on-site and off.
The Payroll function does not have to collect, read, and process cards or timesheets letting payroll and managers have a real-time view of tasks underway.
With a quality online web clock, you can track employee time and attribute the hours to a specific job or client order. And, these systems manage time off, PTO, and leaves, calculating hours consumed and hours remaining,
Web clocks will monitor employee shifts and forecast staffing needs creating reports that cover employee hours across the board and not just per employee day. They even trigger overtime reporting warns as employees approach allocated hours.
In short, payroll runs in minutes, and employees can see pay detail online. That alone makes an online web clock better than a payroll clerk because it records everything, reports what you want, and edits when you need to, backing up data day in and day out.
Time equalizes all things
As Robert Lee Hotz wrote in The Walls Street Journal, “time is a great equalizer.” And, whoever appears to control time has the power. If you want to manage effectively, you first need to manage time. And, online web clocks will help you do that well.
Controlling time
But while time might be the great equalizer, there are ways to win. Besides controlling and tracking time, you can also follow in the footsteps of great industrialists and invent fantastic devices to reduce the amount of labor required.
Take call center automation solutions, for example. These aren’t strictly necessary. You can run a help desk the conventional way. But the reality is that they make a massive difference by saving agents time and reducing energy expenditure.
The cloud, robotics, and even email marketing software does something similar. It reduces the amount of labor required in innumerable business endeavors. And the more you can do that at scale, the more efficient your business will be.